Edition:

Blake's progress

Like today's YBA's, William Blake felt compelled to shock and provoke. But that's where the similarity ends. On the eve of his Tate Britain blockbuster, we celebrate a great painter, poet and visionary

Two things occurred to me, when I read the news that Tate Britain is putting on a William Blake blockbuster, the biggest show of Blake there has ever been, opening 9 November. The first was surprise at the idea that the exhibition is somehow supposed to confirm this mad, old, paranoid, wild man's continuing relevance for 'the modern art of today'.

This led to my second thought, which is that because I usually write about today's art, I hardly ever think about William Blake. His sincerity and propensity to experience visions always seemed to separate him for me from anything today's art is supposed to be about. I might have added his name to a list of influences on Chris Ofili's paintings once or twice in some articles, but that's only because this is an accepted bit of hyping, it's not something anyone's expected to stop and think about.

I like today's art, of course, and feel connected to it, but not because it's about anything deep or because it has the feel of something important. It's likeable because it's about the shallow concerns everyone has today. Blake, on the other hand, was against anything anyone else thought, unless they were mythological, biblical, or from an imagined lost ancient past.

He was tormented and had inner conflicts, and his great vast idea-systems and his anguish over good and evil and heaven and hell produced works that obviously are nothing but deep, and there can only ever be a clanging ring of profundity about them for us. Even though visually he's not particularly lovely or pleasing. He called other engravers he had known as apprentices and who set up engraving shops at the same time he did, 'lumps of ignorance', but their style wasn't all that different to his. It's his intensity that makes him different. He believed his art was divinely inspired.

Today's art isn't about intensity on any level and no one expects it to be. It's based on an absorbed or picked-up-from-the-air-when-still-a-student structuralist idea of creativity, vaguely scientific or science-revering, shunning anything soulful or beyond reason. When art produced from this mind-set is irrational, the irrationalism is silly rather than divine. The art has shocks to make it noticeable, and the shocks are often funny, or at least they make sense. Anyone can get this art, after the initial jarring feeling.

Sensation art, or Apocalypse or Intelligence or Turner Prize art is based on a formula where something looks startling at first and then turns out to be expressing some kind of banal idea, which somebody will be sure to tell you about. The ideas are never important or even really ideas, more notions, like the notions in advertising. Nobody pursues them anyway, because there's nothing there to pursue. It would be like pursuing the ideas in Snatch or Essex Boys . Today's art is a kind of hell, one Blake could never have imagined, even though he seems to have imagined everything - a multitude of vivid hells and heavens.

Mainly, Blake imagined great legends of existence, based more or less on his own inner torments. One of them was that he felt guilty that he couldn't love his father, even though his father was very loving toward him. He experienced parental love as oppression. He later wrote poems about the tyrannical power of parents and the trials of children. But, in fact, his parents were amazingly supportive of him as a child, when he was shockingly badly behaved. Blake was lucky enough to have been born when a new idea about children had just taken hold: they were individuals who evolved slowly, not little adults - that is, not essentially already formed and just waiting to grow bigger. He didn't want to go to school, and his parents said he didn't have to. His mother taught him to read and write at home, instead. He 'detested blows', so they never gave him any. His father, who wasn't rich, gave him money to buy prints by Michelangelo and Raphael when he was still a teenager. He cried when he told another artist once, when he was very old, how impressed he was by the story of the prodigal son.

I admire today's art, of course, but I would never say it was anything but a masquerade kind of art. I always assume its audience thinks this, too, and I'm surprised when they don't. Nothing personal can exist in it, and the notion of torment is just a spin for press releases. In fact, wherever there might be points of connection between our art and Blake's, it turns out to be a cul-de-sac. He was mad and Tracey Emin is mad. He was extreme and so is Damien Hirst. He was obsessive and the Chapman brother's model of hell in Apocalypse is obsessive. But Blake was apocalyptic and Apocalypse isn't. Blake was intelligent and Intelligence at the Tate wasn't. He would be too incomprehensible for the Turner Prize. He studied at the Royal Academy and rebelled against the Academy's principals. But the 21st-century Royal Academy, jolly, eclectic, ratings-obsessed, doesn't have any principals.

Blake was in his forties when the 18th century ended. He lived another 30 years into the next century. His family had been lower-middle class. His father converted from Church of England to Baptism when Blake was a child. It was a mildly prosperous family. Baptism was like Methodism or Quakerism, it was thought to be a religion of the heart rather than a bit of social trickery designed to keep the poor down. Blake began seeing visions at a young age - he screamed at the sight of God passing the window when he was four. But initially it was his older brother John who had visions. John later gave them up and came to despise them, with William taking over the visionary role. Although Blake was coddled as a child, John was the favourite son. Blake later called him the Evil One.

Blake married young and stayed faithful to his wife for 50 years. His writings are full of explorations of sexuality, sometimes verging on the pornographic. They're also full of anguish about sex and the eternal conflict between men and women. Catherine Blake died three years after him, and on her death bed called out to him as if he was in the other room, saying she was going to be joining him soon. They both believed in an afterlife. In fact, Blake believed in a before life as well. He believed it was in the before and after lives that his work was getting the top prizes. So he needn't worry about the now life. He once wrote: '... I am more famed in Heaven for my works than I could well conceive. In my Brain are Studies and Chambers filled with books & pictures of old, which I wrote & painted in ages of Eternity long before my mortal life; and whose works are the delights and study of Archangels. Why, then, should I be anxious about the riches of fame or mortality? The Lord our Father will do for us & with us according to his Divine will for our Good.'

He lived through the rise of industrialisation, commercialisation and rationalism. He was against all three. He was for ancient knowledge, spiritualism and mysticism. He thought England was the thing, but not the same England everyone else lived in. The true England was sleeping, he was going to wake it up through poetry and art - England would be Jerusalem and angels and the great celebration and redemption, instead of tyranny and seediness.

When he was young, there were riots over industrialisation. Then there were trials for treason. Mobs of patriots could turn on anyone considered to be anti-monarchist. There were laws against illegal assemblies. England was a much more paranoid nation than today, but also a much more aggressive one, which makes sense - aggressive colonial expansion overseas, paranoia at home - Blake was against war, as well as against the art of his time and everything else of his time. He was an outcast, but he seems always to have made an extra effort to cast himself out. He would be incredibly tiresome in our world.

When he was 27, he fell out with a little artistic circle where, for a while, he was welcomed every week as an interesting eccentric. He sang his poems to the group and they liked it, but now he was against them. He wrote a satire that sent them all up cruelly, called an Island in the Moon .

The characters included General Jacko, named after a famous performing monkey of the period, also Obtuse Angle, Inflammable Gass the Windfinder, Mrs Nannicantipot and Suction. They start out considering the Nature of Truth, but soon their discussion turns to madness. One of them recites a poem to the recently deceased Samuel Johnson which includes the verse:

Aha to Doctor Johnson

Said Scipio Africanus

Lift up my Roman Petticoat

And kiss my Roman Anus

Blake was against chit-chat and politeness but today's modern art is the best friend of chit-chat. Blake created memorable monsters such as Nebuchadnezzar and the Ghost of a Flea. These are frightening images, inexplicable, full of darkness. They didn't bring Blake any success at all. Nebuchadnezzar is on all fours in a cave, with horny fingernails and the Ghost of a Flea is a scaly beast. They're sensational because they're intense, Gothic, a bit horrible and a bit over-wrought. Our own version of this is Sensation which was frequently Gothic and horrible and with a bit of darkness at every turn. But polite conversation today is at home with the idea Sensation ushered in - that art isn't profound, only mock profound. The only the thing it has to be is profoundly successful, which Blake never was.

He could never get his art over to a popular audience, although it was always intended to be popular. He stayed poor throughout his life. He had a patron, William Hayley, who supported him for a few years but also caused him torment. At first, Blake idealised the relationship (he said the little cottage in the country Hayley got for Blake and his wife to live in was 'a place fit for immortals'), then when reality set in he became wrathful and fierce toward Hayley. (He realised Hayley condescended to him and thought Cowper, a much more famous poet than Blake who Hayley also patronised, was much more important.)

Artists today have Charles Saatchi as their patron, but they don't have any illusions about what's going on there. Saatchi is naturally money and success-orientated, just as the artists are. When he occasionally sells their stuff off to make a profit, they might get a bit rageful, but that's only because it diminishes their success. Not because they loath commerce.

In Saatchi's wrangles and dealings obviously everything is absolutely harmless and no one's committing any crime. After all, it's just how life is today and it's even part of the excitement of the art - will it make it? Will it fail? Will it get high prices at auction? Will it be on TV? Except in Blake's understanding of art and its connection to God and the angels, both Saatchi and the artist would be criminals. This is harsh for our age, mad even. But at least let's not say he has a burning relevance for today's modern art. He would have a burning bonfire for it.

 William Blake is at Tate Britain, Millbank, London SW1 (020 7887 8000) from 9 November to 11 February 2001.